The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien #20booksofsummer23 books 2 to 4

The Country Girls trilogy is a set of books written by Edna O’Brien charting the early years of a young Irish girl, Caithleen, and her friend Baba and their lives and what they get up to. I picked up these startling copies at my local secondhand bookshop, when it existed before Covid. Now it is just a shopfront with the ghosts of books inside it. So sad. However I have these lovely books in remembrance at least.

The focus of the book is Caithleen, Cait, who is a teenager living on a rundown old farm with her mother, who she adores, a drunken leery father who takes all their money and goes off drinking and gambling, and the farm help, a man named Hickey who does everything her mother can’t manage. From the beginning there is a sense of love and doom. Her mother cossets the young Cait who is naive and docile and easily led by her sharper minded friend Baba. The girl is terrified of her father, terrified that he’ll come home and hit her mother and steal the money they’ve eked out of what is left of the farm, which is exactly what happens fairly early on in the story.

Despite the chaos of her existence, Cait does well at school and she is cared for and loved, not just by her mother but by Hickey and others in the village. Typically, however, there are lecherous, predatory old dudes everywhere, and Cait, with her softness and pliability, seems to attract them all. Of most interest to her is the foreign, slightly mysterious ‘Mr. Gentleman’, who has a mournful face and a wife he does not seem to like. Somehow he always has eyes for Cait.

It all goes wrong, or worse I might say, after her father comes home from a binge and wrecks havoc in their home. When Cait gets home, having been told that day she has won a scholorship for a convent school, she finds her mother has gone, apparently to stay with family, and she is left alone with Hickey and her crazy, drunken father. Fortunately there is always Baba’s house, and later that evening she goes to the makeshift cinema with Baba and Baba’s parents. The sense of foreboding lingers:

“The hall was almost dark. Curtains of black cloth had been put over the windows and pinned to the window-frames at the four corners. The light from the six oil-lamps at the front of the stage barely showed people to their seats. Two of the lamps smoked and the globes were black. I looked back to see if there was any sign of Hickey. I looked through the row of chairs, then along the rows of stools behind the chairs, and farther back still I searched with my eyes along the plants that were laid on porter barrels. He was at the end of the last row of planks with Maisie next to him. The cheapest seats. They were laughing. The back of the hall was full of girls laughing. Girls with curly hair, girls with shiny black coils of it, like bunches of elderberries, falling on to their shoulders, girls with moist blackberry eyes; smirking and talking and waiting.”

Cait never gets to see the film, tragedy strikes and instead she finds herself packed off to boarding school with a reluctant Baba. Whilst academically Cait thrives at the school, emotionally and mentally she suffers. Baba, always keen to lead her astray, convinces her to commit some act of infamy in order to get them expelled. The act succeeds and the girls are sent home. The outcome is worse that she expected, her father – drunk as usual – hits her, forcing Baba’s parents to intervene.

The girls end up moving to Dublin and living in a poor boarding house run by a German woman called Joanna. Here they find freedom and entertainment, or is it? Cait has a job in a grocery store. Baba goes to college. At night they go out drinking, meeting men and having awful dates. It is then that Cait starts to see more of Mr Gentleman, the older married man who has always shown a particular interest in her. Guess you can see what’s coming, eh?

In the second book, The Girl With Green Eyes, Cait and Mr Gentleman are no more. However, Cait finds a new older man to adore – this one is Eugene, a divorcee and maker of documentary movies. He is glamerous, in her eyes, worldly and experienced. The book follows their relationship, the ructions that surround it, the reaction of her father, the priest (yikes). The way Eugene behaves towards Cait is both tender and dismissive. He has a habit of calling her fat and being rather rude and controlling. Yet she loves him. But she is also young, feckless and inexperienced. She does not have the emotional maturity to manage such a relationship. She is jealous and sulky, wracked with self-doubt and insecurity. This, not surprisingly, leads to a breakdown of the relationship. At the end of the book, Eugene has left her and she and Baba try their luck in England.

In the final book, Girls in Their Married Bliss, both girls are now married, to greater and lesser success. This time we also get Baba’s viewpoint, a more direct, unforgiving and pragmatic voice. The story charts the progress of their marriages. You might guess all is not as blissful as the title suggests.

This trilogy of books was controversial when published dealing, as it does, so frankly with the desires of young girls and so critically with the desires and controlling ways of men, and the church. There is a sense that all Cait really wants is to be loved, to feel loved and secure, which she never does. To achieve this she gives away all her gifts – her talent, her intelligence – to men that don’t really deserve it, or rather who are canny enough to exploit it. Ignorance is the name of the day: keep girls unprepared for life, meanwhile the men do as they please, behave as boorishly and uncontrollably as they like and no one says a peep. The men definitely come off badly in these books, the men and the church that props them up. Despite her father’s manic drinking and wasteful ways, he is constantly referred to by others as ‘a good man’ and the priests refuse to condemn him. Cait, however, being independent and making her own choices is constantly criticised, adding to her lack of self-worth.

What is extraordinary about this trilogy, though perhaps its more true to say of the first two books of the trilogy, is the quality of the writing and the beautifully evocative way in which O’Brien renders the society into which Cait is born and has to navigate. She is insightful and writes with a clarity that is neither sentimental nor judgemental, rather the judgement is revealed to the reader by a writer who is unflinching in her gaze:

“It is the only time that I am thankful for being a woman, that time of evening, when I draw the curtains, take off my old clothes and prepare to go out. Minute by minute the excitement grows. I brush my hair under the light and the colours are autumn leaves in the sun. I shadow my eyelids with black stuff and am astonished by the look of mystery it gives my eyes. I hate being a woman. Vain and shallow and superficial. Tell a woman that you love her and she’ll ask you to write it down, so that she can show it to her friends. But I am happy at that time of night. I feel tender towards the world, I pet the wallpaper as if it were white rose petals, flushed pink at the edges; I pick up my old, tired shoes and they are silver flowers that some man has laid outside my door. I kissed myself in the mirror and ran out of the room, happy and hurried and suitably mad.”

However, this definitely peters out in the third book and I found Girls in Their Married Bliss much more pedestrian and less evocative or insightful. I am not sure it added much other than misery to the story; by this point Cait has become tedious, her frailties overblown. I liked the introduction of Baba’s voice and personality and yet it lacked force or originality. In the end I was glad to make it through the final book, and couldn’t help feeling that it was written, perhaps, more at the publisher’s behest rather than O’Brien having more to say about these two girls. And perhaps it carries the weight of being less of a ‘Bildungsroman’ and more the real drudgery of a life that, in the end, was typified by a need for something society would never allow it to have: freedom and security, an opportunity for growth and self-realisation. All nipped in the bud by a patriarchal society that ultimately saw women as something to be used and controlled.